Aruba, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s network equipment subsidiary, today launched a new product called the Edge Services Platform that uses artificial intelligence to find and fix issues in enterprise networks automatically.

ESP is the culmination of years of development, said Aruba President Keerti Melkote. The product finds issues by analyzing telemetry data from the HPE subsidiary’s Wi-Fi systems, data center networking devices and its software-defined wide area network products. This information is pooled in a centralized data lake so that it can be evaluated by ESP’s AI algorithms.

Aruba claims the result is a unified analytics layer that provides insights into a customer’s entire network, from backend data centers to the Wi-Fi access points in remote offices. “As a result of this common data lake, ESP can quickly access and correlate cross-domain event information and display it through Aruba Central, our cloud native single pane of glass for network operations and or through Aruba ESP APIs,” Patrick LaPorte, Aruba’s senior director of cloud and software solutions marketing, told SiliconANGLE.

Besides telemetry logs from a customer’s environment, ESP’s AI algorithms also leverage a pool of “modeling data.” This repository is distilled from about 1.5 billion data points generated daily by about a million Aruba devices worldwide.

The HPE subsidiary said ESP identifies when a network component is malfunctioning, triangulates the cause and either automatically fixes it or generates troubleshooting recommendations for administrators. They can see information from ESP in Aruba’s Aruba Central network monitoring tool. In the tool’s interface, a newly announced feature called AI Search makes it possible to use natural-language queries to pull up the diagnostics data for a malfunctioning component.

There’s another automation feature called AI Assist for handling particularly thorny problems. It organizes data about a technical issue in a support ticket that can be shared inside a company’s information technology team and with Aruba support teams. 

Aruba said that having all the data about an issue centralized in Aruba Central removes the need for administrators to use multiple analytics tools. “The advantage for customers is information is displayed in context, in single views that enable them to collect information and resolve issues more quickly,” LaPorte said.

The HPE subsidiary is touting some promising early results. According to Aruba, ESP’s AI algorithms increased throughput by 15% for one customer’s network while cutting the amount of time it takes administrators to resolve technical issues by nearly 90%.

Aruba, which was acquired by HPE predecessor Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2015, was at the time best known as a maker of Wi-Fi  systems. It moved into data center networking in 2017. The company has since sought to have customers standardize both their data center networks and Wi-Fi networks on its hardware by offering benefits such as simplified licensing, an effort ESP will advance by providing a unified analytics layer that ties the two parts of the company’s portfolio together.

ESP is available in the cloud as a managed service hosted by Aruba partners or on-premises. 

Photo: Aruba